Posts under ‘Books’

Hugo-winning author and Shadow Unit co-founder Elizabeth Bear, author of some of my favorite books, has a new book out today, Grail, third in a science fiction trilogy (Dust and Chill being its predecessors). I may have gone on a bit of a Bear-book-buying binge. When I went looking for a copy of Grail for [...]

A very full October has concluded. I still haven’t written much about Viable Paradise, but I will. I’ve been gone every weekend in October, and weekends are when I usually get blogging done. Also fiction writing and many other useful things. October was very good in many ways, but I’m glad it’s over. November won’t [...]

Patrick Rothfuss, writer and generous human being, runs a fundraiser for Heifer International each year (to which he donates a lot of his own money and even more of his own time). He’s enlisted the SFF community to good effect: this year there were all sorts of prizes available, from ARCs to autographed books to [...]

Since reading Elizabeth Bear’s blog regularly, I’ve been exposed to some very interesting literary criticism. I asked her how to learn that skill – I’m very analytical, but lack the concepts/vocabulary of literary criticism. Previous attempts to learn something about the formal discipline have ended badly, mostly with cursing. A lot of academic literary criticism [...]

There was the one where you not only removed the e-book of 1984 from the store, but sucked it off of people’s Kindles without telling them. There was the one where you classified gay- and lesbian-themed books, including YA and health books, as “Adult”, thus removing them from lists and rankings. (This was later claimed [...]

My attention has been pulled in a thousand different directions lately, and writing has suffered the most. Not much blogging, very little fiction. Much pondering of fiction though. I seem to have developed some sort of process for long pieces of fiction. Come up with an idea: a setting, a scene, a person, a phrase. [...]

Pirate loot, even! One of my favorite writing blogs, Magical Words, is a group effort by several authors. A few I’d read before finding the blog; most were new to me, but I’ve made an effort to get to know all of their fiction better. I like reading this and other author blogs: it helps [...]

In early October I started a Goodreads account. I’d had good intentions of keeping a list of things I’d read, but had not been particularly successful at doing it. I’m notoriously bad at remembering authors and titles, and I wanted something to help me keep track. Most of my fiction comes from the public library, [...]

Yet another installment of “Other people’s stuff”. I’ve been out of town far too much – Saturday was the first morning in a month that I was actually at home. (Jacuzzi rooms win.) I had to make my own coffee, but the cat was delighted. All this travel and the associated preparations has put me [...]

Neil Gaiman wins Newbery Medal for The Graveyard Book. Hooray! (And a Medal, how cool is that?) You can listen to Neil reading the book chapter by chapter during the book tour. (Neil is one of the few authors who SHOULD read his own works.) Edit: I just looked through the winner’s lists for the [...]